Danny has proposed that the ALAC initiate research on a specific, registrant-affecting question: What are the scope and magnitude of transfer-away fees among the various registrars?
In my experience, the fees are less of a problem than registrars who don't provide the required authcodes, or who provide them very slowly. But I suppose the fees are easier to research. Also, related to registries and registrars, I see that ICANN has a "gTLD Registry Data Escrow Report" on the home page. Having looked through it, I see that all the registries are supposed to put copies of the data in escrow once a week. But I don't see any report on whether they actually do so. Based on some of the language in the registry failover stuff, I get the impression that some of them don't. I also see that section 3.6 of the registrar accreditation agreement requires each registrar to put its data in escrow either directly with ICANN or with an approved escrow agent. Again, we know that Registrfly didn't do so, and I wonder if anyone else does. A failure to enforce the escrow rules is an egregious failure on ICANN's part to protect the stability of the DNS. Perhaps we should alert the Ombudsman. R's, John